Today's Wi-Fi systems have multi-core application processors, but typically the Wi-Fi RX (receiver or reception) frames are sent to a single core that runs a Wi-Fi driver. The frames are then indicated to the OS (operating system). To achieve better performance, it is necessary to distribute the Wi-Fi RX frames between the systems cores. Commercially available systems such as Linux support RSS (receive side scaling) for Wi-Fi, where the Wi-Fi NIC (network interface controller) may send frames to multiple cores according to a particular type of hashing over the TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/internet protocol) frame's header. This concept has been used for a long time in fast Ethernet solutions, but for Wi-Fi it is more complex. A difficulty that needs to be addressed in order to get the full benefit of multiple cores processing received frames in parallel, is that the state of the reorder buffers needs to be synchronized, without using OS sync mechanisms such as LOCK.